Scaling Up: Where to From Here?
Many of our conversations with WMF staff came back to the value of how to intelligently, thoughtfully "scale up" the Wikimedia movement, and specifically how to identify, support, and promote "projects that provide opportunities to reach the Wikimedia movement's goal of spreading participation in free culture across boundaries of language, gender, and geography."[1]
There are significant logistical challenges to this work, common to the field of international philanthropy. For instance, the basic issue of how to coordinate communication across so many time zones. The Foundation faces complicated dynamics regarding how to distribute funds across so many different currencies and varied economic scales, and a range of grantees including individuals and small groups or organizations that often do not have nonprofit status or other formal registration. "We have to push against a mythology - among many people who don't live and breathe and work within the international grantmaking space - that giving small amounts of money to individuals is easy to do," says Anasuya Sengupta, "It's the hardest thing to do, the most expensive." There are also some extraneous limitations regarding international funding, for instance US Government restrictions on funding in Iran.
Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking is also evolving to consciously challenge a perception that individuals will receive small grants, groups will receive medium grants, and the largest organizations will receive the largest grants. This may often be the case, but it should not create a limiting structure, says Sengupta. She explains that it must be made clear that there are multiple points of entry to the pipeline of ideas and initiatives: "You start with the beginning of an idea, an experiment, then you realize that experiment. It becomes a fairly well designed project. Then it can scale, and you want to put a whole lot more resources behind it? That gets the large grant. It should not matter at that point if you're an individual, an informal group, or you're an established organization."
There is also an ongoing discussion about how the grantmaking process can become more proactive, rather than only responding to proposals that come in. Staff spoke of possible future strategies of explicitly inviting specific submissions, either on an individual basis or through calls for proposals, and the possibility that Wikimedia might one day consider funding more aligned work outside of the Wikimedia movement.
- ↑ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/G rants:Start#explore-gr
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